It was at once the least important result of the weekend, and one of the most important all season. Parma’s 1-0 win over Juventus on Saturday will almost certainly make no difference to either team’s league outcomes this season, the victorious Ducali concluding their weekend 13 points adrift of safety in last place, while the defeated Bianconeri remain 12 points clear at the top of the Serie A table.
And yet, this result still mattered. It mattered to a squad of Parma players who have carried on showing up to work every day even though they have not been paid since last summer. It mattered to their fans, 15,000 of whom filled the stands of the Tardini despite their team’s predicament. It certainly mattered to the 18-year-old goalscorer José Mauri, who declared this to be the joint-happiest day of his life – matched only by the one when he signed for Parma four years earlier.
It mattered because a club that stands on the brink of oblivion refuses to go quietly into the night. Just over three weeks have passed since Parma were declared bankrupt with debts of €218.4m, and results have improved drastically in the interim. Prior to beating Juventus, Parma had defeated Udinese on Wednesday evening. Before that, they drew away with Inter at San Siro.
“If Parma had only gone bust a little earlier,” wrote Andrea Schianchi in Sunday’s Gazzetta Sportiva, “perhaps now they might still have a hope of staying up.”
He was joking, but only up to a point. After a chaotic nine months in which the club switched hands between three different sets of owners – the most recent of whom, Giampietro Manenti, was arrested on money-laundering charges last month – the fact of having been placed under the control of administrators Angelo Anedda and Alberto Guiotto has restored some semblance of stability.
The club’s future remains utterly bleak. Anedda and Guiotto are confident Parma will get the green light at a hearing this Wednesday to complete their season as scheduled, but unless a new owner steps forward to pay the club’s football-specific debts (wages and taxes, primarily) of €74.3m between now and the end of June, then Parma Football Club will officially fold. While a new team would no doubt rise from the ashes, it would need to start over from Serie D, with none of the current group of players.
Rather than dwell on that possibility, though, the majority of people involved with the club have chosen to make the most of the time they have left. Players have finally begun to throw themselves into matches with the abandon of a group who have nothing to lose. Fans and local businesses have redoubled their support. This weekend Roberto Donadoni dug into his own pocket to buy shirt sponsorship space for the restaurant, Dac e Trá, that he owns along with former Milan team-mate Mauro Tassotti.
Most importantly, though, the manager refused to let himself get distracted from preparing his team for their game against Juventus. A game that, on paper, his team had no right to win.
A whopping 57 points separated the two teams at kick-off. Juventus had lost only a single league game. By the time that Mauri struck in the second-half, the champions had gone 431 minutes in Serie A without conceding a single goal. More remarkable still, in 29 league games they had spent a grand total of just 31 minutes trailing to any opponent.
And yet Parma hardly appeared overmatched. Although they conceded possession to Juventus, they allowed their opponents just three shots on target all game. The Bianconeri had fielded a weakened side, resting Carlos Tevez and Alvaro Morata with an eye on Tuesday’s Champions League quarter-final first-leg against Monaco, but their desire to win this game was made clear when the manager, Massimiliano Allegri, could barely speak at his post-match press conference, having lost his voice from screaming at his players.
There was much for Donadoni to be proud of, from the ease with which his defenders stifled Fernando Llorente to the renewed vibrancy up front of Ishak Belfodil. But Mauri’s goal, in particular, would bring the manager satisfaction. The midfielder has quietly been enjoying an impressive campaign, but Donadoni had been imploring him all season to show a little more adventure and push on from midfield to join the attack.
Mauri did so on Saturday, sprinting 30 yards to meet Belfodil’s cutback on the edge of the area and stroke it into the roof of the net. (“I want to thank God and my grandma, who is watching me up there,” said the goalscorer, reminding us one more time of his club’s plight as he emerged from the changing room with his shirt and shorts in a plastic carrier bag.
The celebrations at the Tardini had been befitting of a team that had just won the league, and Parma chose to carry them on into a second day by organising a public training session and barbecue in the city’s Cittadella Park a day later. It was a throwback to the early-90s, when Nevio Scala’s great Europe-conquering teams used to do the same.
There will be no return for this Parma team to those heady days but this most meaningful of meaningless victories deserved celebrating all the same.
Talking points
• At last, Lazio have their sorpasso. The Eagles claimed second place from Roma in style, notching an eighth consecutive league win when they crushed Empoli 4-0 at the Stadio Olimpico. It is too late, realistically, to believe that they can catch Juventus in first, but they will at least have the chance to make the leaders sweat when they face them in Turin next weekend. Among the many impressive characteristics of this Lazio team is the sheer number of players they now have contributing goals. Stefano Mauri, Antonio Candreva and, of course, Felipe Anderson all scored on Sunday, but so did the ageless Miroslav Klose, who has reached double figures for the third time in his four Serie A seasons.
• Samir Handanovic can sometimes get a little defensive about his reputation as a penalty-saving expert, shooting down questions about this talent and insisting that there is so much more to his game. That is true, no doubt, but his reputation for keeping out spot-kicks is nevertheless well-earned. After denying Luca Toni late in Inter’s 3-0 win over Verona, Handanovic has now kept out six of the last seven penalties he has faced in Serie A.
• Napoli halted a run of five games without a win by thrashing fellow Champions League aspirants Fiorentina, but this was still not enough to persuade Aurelio De Laurentiis to cancel the punitive training camp that he had ordered in the wake of their Coppa Italia defeat to Lazio in midweek. Players were permitted to return home to their families on Sunday night, but had to be back at Castelvolturno by Monday afternoon.
• Also of note in that Napoli game, Gonzalo Higuaín being denied a goal on a shot that quite clearly crossed the line after crashing down off the bar. Happily for all concerned, Serie A will finally have Hawk-Eye to assist with goal-line decisions from next season.
Results: Atalanta 2-1 Sassuolo, Cesena 0-1 Chievo, Genoa 2-0 Cagliari, Lazio 4-0 Empoli, Milan 1-1 Sampdoria, Napoli 3-0 Fiorentina, Parma 1-0 Juventus, Torino 1-1 Roma, Udinese 1-3 Palermo, Verona 0-3 Inter
